Cultivating Relational Space for All That Is

The Invitation in Activation

I invite you to notice what sensations, thoughts, or feelings arise when you hold the idea that there is no wrong or bad nervous system state. Maybe that feels exciting — like freedom — or impossible, like trying to befriend an erupting volcano.

Curiosity in the Constriction

Our autonomic nervous system functions automatically, beyond conscious control. Sometimes, it signals real threats—in our bodies, environment, or relationships. Other times, it echoes past wounds, overestimates danger, or muffles its signals in an effort to protect us. Disconnection, discomfort, and numbness can be seen as your body's invitations to turn toward the life inside with curiosity and kindness—on your own time, at your own pace, and in the company that feels supportive for you.

Feathers at the Edge

While we can’t control these automatic messages, we can choose to deepen our connection to qualities like softness, warmth, ease, or any other ventral vagal state we resonate with cultivating. As we embody these qualities more fully in how we relate to our body’s messages, we may find—over time—that we can meet what is with a presence that feels expansive and uniquely responsive to our own lived experiences. In this way, even long-held messages that were never met with relational warmth, or deeply ingrained protective patterns, can begin to gently unfurl and transform.

Softening Into Expansion

In that softening, we may notice that new possibilities come into view.

The Guard Bearing Gifts

This practice isn’t about using ventral vagal energy to sidestep discomfort, silence hard truths, or mask our inner experience with forced positivity. Instead, it nurtures our connection to our whole range—opening our capacity to tend the sacred messages from our nervous system with access to our rich palette of divinely human qualities, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the very messages that are trying to protect us.

Draw the Circle Wide

Like all art, this unfolds gradually, through practice over time.

Even when perfectionism or performance tap at the door—or waltz onstage and bask in the spotlight—this practice remains a work of beauty: messy, honest, and tenderly alive to what is… and what is possible—for us.

Thank you for your practice,

Teri✨💜🌱